


Heaven Help Us

by Lana_Morrigan



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, this has a good ending I promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:41:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21739285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lana_Morrigan/pseuds/Lana_Morrigan
Summary: Heaven and Hell go to war and Crowley and Aziraphel are caught in-between with disastrous consequences...Fic based off a beautiful and heart wrenching piece of art on Tumblr by midaril.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 109





	Heaven Help Us

**Author's Note:**

> https://64.media.tumblr.com/26d371887a63ea54f0041fb796d5b8b9/258c1485ce437bec-94/s640x960/d40bb79b9973ca50be13aff5f0987c510799688d.jpg 
> 
> I saw that art and couldn't pass it by without trying to write something?
> 
> Also I did a rather severe edit/rewrite on this because it turns out if I try to write when sleep deprived I forget what tenses are and use all of them whenever I please. (Seriously how the hell did I not notice?) So, anyways that should be fixed now.
> 
> Technically this is set a couple of years after my Thrice Fallen piece, but you don't have to have read it.

They sit quietly side by side, holding hands. They're on the leather sofa at the back of the bookshop where they have so often sat, or Crowley has lounged, as they drink wine and talk about the world, about their jobs, about philosophy. (Those times had been easy, filled with a piquant warmth as they bickered and bantered back and forth. This time is not.) The early evening sunlight is painting the bookshop gold and turning dust motes into infinitesimal faery-lights. But it's not a true gold only gilt: a flat shining colour that's cold to the touch.

The brandy decanter and their glasses sit untouched on the table; neither of them have spoken for some time.

“We could pretend,” Crowley offers at last, his voice rusted at the edges.

“Pretend?”

“To fight.”

Aziraphale looks at him and swiftly looks away again, unable to bear it. “My dear, my aura can manifest as a thousand diamond-edged blades of blessed sanctity, just as yours can be venom and hellfire. They’re never going to believe…”

“Suppose not,” he says glumly. Then, “But they’ll be busy, won’t they?”

Conflicted blue eyes turn to meet amber-gold and stare this time because Aziraphale knows that careful testing-a-wily-thought sort of tone. “Busy?”

“Fighting. In all the chaos and the melee, it’s not like Gabriel’s gonna pop up and give you performance notes, is it? _‘You there - Principality - give it a bit more welly!’”_

The angel cringes slightly and then seems to find his resolve. “No… no I imagine not.”

Crowley's grip on the angel's hand tightens. “So we just have to find one another…” _In all the legions of Heaven and Hell combined_ goes unspoken, but they both know it. “Find each other,” he pushes on, resolute, “and pretend. Y’know. To fight. But all we’re really doing is…”

“Wrestling?”

The demon had been going to say ‘protecting one another’. He opens his mouth, closes it, thinks of the statue in his flat and swallows, throat dry. “Yeah. Wrestling. Sure.”

They stay like that, side by side, hands laced together, staring ahead as the sun sets and the shadows lengthen to night.

* * *

Up from Earth, to mortal eyes, it looks like meteors warring with the Northern Lights, like the blistering dance of steam when lava hits the ocean and the vapour rushes up, like magnetic South and magnetic North butting heads amidst a pool of iron filings creating patterns that radiate and repulse one another in endless waves...

To Crowley, it looks like bloody chaos.

He wonders if the Universe can stand it - so much power in one place. Had the Almighty truly meant for this to happen? His mouth sours to a snarl. _Bollocks to your plan,_ he thinks, the midnight of his wings unfurling, his aura burning bright around him in twisting serpentine ribbons of hellfire. He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, lets the breath out in one long hiss as his nails lengthen into claws and the crescent of what once had been a halo blazes spitefully - his very own broken crown. When he opens his eyes again they shine like molten amber and the only thought in his head is _Aziraphale_.

* * *

He’d searched once for Aziraphale before with just as much fear and fervour, smoke stinging his eyes and the roar of fire in his ears -

_Aziraphale! Aziraphale where the Heaven are you? I can’t find you!_

\- No. He will find his angel - he _will_. That was then, this is now, and nothing has ever been more important. He weaves through the firmament like a drunken missile, skirting round the skirmishes as fast as he can, eyes wide, searching always searching for a glimpse of that Eden’s-dawn aura, or those white-golden curls...

 _For Someone’s sake!_ Crowley thinks as he twists and rolls, soars and dives like a lovesick raven on crack, like some lunatic feathered bullet with no clear trajectory.

“ANGEL WHERE ARE YOU?” his aura screams in desperation, words without words. And then he feels it - faintly - there? - no - there! Eastwards… Fucking _Firmament_ was Heaven really that predictable as to give the Principality of the Eastern Gate governance of a platoon on the Eastern flank? Argh! Never mind that - move!

He avoids the brilliance of the Host as much as he can - avoids the Hordes of Hell whilst he's at it because he wouldn't put it past some of them ( _cough_ -Hastur- _cough_ ) to indulge in a little pay-back. But it's a battlefield on a scale that is almost too vast to imagine, he can't avoid it all.

Angels know how to fly like doves: calm, serene and perfect. Demons know how to claw and gnaw like rats: low down and dirty. Crowley, unlike most of the Fallen, kept his wings and - thank Someone - knows how to use them. He’s had six millennia of observing ravens and falcons and eagles and owls, swifts and skuas and osprey - he _knows_ how to use his wings. And he employs every single dirty trick he’s ever picked up from an owl’s deceptively gentle swoop, a falcon’s lead-shot-dive, and a skuas's - well a skuas's everything really, those birds are bloody murder machines.

The hellfire of his aura runs across the bones of his wings and the tips of his feathers turning them into scythes of flame and darkness, lethal to all they touch. The crescent of his halo strikes out at anything within reach, darting viper-quick to spit venom in defence. He doesn't care about the fighting he just cares about reaching his angel, and when pushed (and oh he has been) he can be vicious in getting what he wants. He's leaving a haphazard trail of poisoned auras and burning wings in his wake, smoke and screams revealing when another combatant made the mistake of getting too close. He's Eden's Serpent for Someone's sake - his entire being is an aposematic mess that screams out a warning to back off - you'd think they'd take the hint...

 _Where are you?_ _For Sa- for Go-_ There!

There’s Aziriphale, all sunlight and those stupid duck-down curls that he wants to run his fingers through and - never mind the curls! Aziraphale seems to have held his own admirably since he's knee-deep in charred and dismembered hell beasts. He doesn't look like he's wounded either, his robes still pristine-white despite the carnage surrounding him. Crowley can't help a twitch of a smile at that. _Bloody fussy angel! ….Oh fuck._

Once upon a time not so long ago, Malphas had flung Crowley off the Bone Bridge into Erebus, the Abyss without end. And Crowley would have been in agony and fucked up severe for the next six thousand years, had it not been for Aziraphale’s stubborn insistence on rescuing him. (If you think a Duke of Hell can hold a grudge, that's nothing on a Prince; their memories of hate are second only to Lucifer's.)

It seemed Crowley had not been the only demon to seek out Aziraphale - and what was worse - Malphas had got there first.

_Shitshitshitshitshit!_

Malphas (giant bastard porcupine-quilled raven-beaked humanoid wearing a filthy 18thcentury house coat, and a cancerous cephalopod on the back of his skull) was about to extend several quills of his rancid feathered anatomy into bone spears that would ram straight through -

_NO!_

It isn’t a word, it's a bellow of effort as Crowley pulls every scrap of power he has, every iota of will, into stopping time. It feels like pushing a white-hot breadknife into his ear but he doesn't care because it gives him space - just enough - to barrel sideways into Aziraphale and knock him to the ground.

The angel gazes up at him in bewildered astonishment before his eyes light with pleasure and he smiles as warmly as the sun, all love and joy and the ills of the rest of the world momentarily forgotten. “Crowley!”

Crowley’s mouth quirks up at the side. “Hello angel,” he grins. And then his head arches back and his wings convulse, an odd noise punched from his throat. 

Time has caught up with him.

“Crowley?” Aziraphale murmurs, eyes wide and voice strained with panic.

The demon's head tips back down slowly, all of him shaking. Had Aziraphale been able to look at anything other than Crowley’s face, he would have seen the three spear-long bone quills sticking out of the demon’s back, the points of two having pierced all the way through Crowley’s sternum, the tips channeling blood along their grooves to drip, warm and heavy onto Aziraphale’s chest.

“Angel,” he breathes, blood framing the familiar fondness of the word and dripping from his lips. He struggles to smile, the whiskey-warmth of his eyes cooling to a rancid bruise-yellow.

Aziraphale’s hand clamps against his mouth, trying to stifle a cry as he realises what has happened, feels the liquid fall on him and soak his robes as rust-bright as Crowley’s hair.

“No,” he whimpers against his own fingers. “No - NO!”

Crowley cants to the side, shaking arms with just enough strength to ensure he doesn't fall on Aziraphale. There's a further bright and blazing moment of pain as his right wing buckles when he falls on it and it folds, broken beneath his weight, and then there isn’t much of anything.

* * *

“I don’t reckon this is right.”

All of Creation pauses - or at least all of Time.

 **No?** The Almighty looks down at the scruffy figure before Her. He's fourteen and has yet to straighten his shoulders and iron out all of the idiosyncrasies of his speech: he still maintains childhood in his heart. He's grown willowy and whilst his face still possesses its soft, boyhood curves, it shows the promise of the handsome young man he'll eventually become. _And wilful,_ the Almighty reminds Herself with a private smile. **What would you do?**

Adam scrunches his nose and scuffs one trainer against the other for a moment in thought. “Well, I wouldn’t fight. Not really. I mean, there’s different types of fighting. Like, like playground fighting where the teacher comes an' tells you off an' maybe you got a bloody nose but it was brilliant and no one’s dead or anything stupid. Then there’s grown-up fighting. Where whole countries go at it an' there’s never a teacher to tell them to stop. They only stop when everyone’s all dead - even the people who didn't want anything to do with it. Then they sign a piece of paper, pretend like it never happened and all the leaders shake hands and go back to doing all the stuff they did before. Dunno." A slouchy sort of shrug. "Doesn’t seem right t’me. An’ you’re meant t’be clever. So how’s it right with you?”

**So what do you suggest?**

Adam had been considering his next answer and was about to launch into an enthusiastic speech about his school's last Sports Day (in which the Them had excelled themselves in all manner of ways and events, not all of which were necessarily school-approved) and how utterly brilliant it had been and how that was like seeing who was best at different things without anyone ending up dead... But as he opens his mouth he happens to catch sight of two familiar figures - and he doesn't like what he sees. Adam points with indignation to where one angel clasps a demon in his arms, his tunic stained with crimson and his wings and aura bright with sorrowful rage. “That,” he says with the unshakable clarity only a child can possess, “that’s all wrong. He can’t. He can't be dead!”

The Almighty raises an eyebrow. **He can, and he is. As are scores of others beyond counting.**

The Antichrist stares God in the face, furious. “But they _love_ each other.”

The Almighty waits.

He sniffs, switching modes. He's now mulishly indifferent, insultingly so, or so it would seem to anyone unfamiliar with teenage behaviour. But as any canny parent knows, this is a shield to mask his hurt and a sword with which to retaliate. “I wrote a book once. It had pirates an’ a spy, and this wizard, and a girl who was a werewolf. It was wicked." For a moment his joy in his own creation almost melts his surliness, but only for a moment. "And at the end the baddie changed his ways and went off with the werewolf and grew flowers in Antarctica. And the pirate and the wizard stopped fighting and started a school..."

His gaze becomes scathing and his eyebrows squirm with sarcasm. "'M just _sayin’._ If this is _your_ story, it’s _rubbish._ Mrs Daniels said my story was _ace._ She'd say yours was _cliche -_ which is a fancy way of saying total _rubbish._ Bet you'd get an F. She probably wouldn't even mark it, just put a big red X through it - an' you'd get detention!”

The Almighty smiles, amused. **Very well Adam Young. _You_ write the ending.**

* * *

The Universe once again spins and Time dusts its hands off and gets to the business of flowing again, but its barely taken a step forward when - " **BEHOLD!** "

The death and volume of that one word rips across the battlefield, stilling angels and demons alike.

" **And… um… stuff. I’m - I mean - I AM DISPLEASED. Yeah. So, like, stop that at once or otherwise your parents are gonna be really cross an' ground you for a week. Or a month. Or forever. Or infinity - infinity plus one ‘cos that’s even longer… (Hang on, can I get Pepper to do this? Pepper’s really good at this sort of thing, she once got Greasy Johnson to… Oh alright, fine!) Right, so you all have to stop now. And maybe start up flower shops in Antarctica or go teach at Hogwarts or something. Whatever you like really I s'pose, just not this.** "

“Why?” Beelzebub and Gabriel both demand, one with confusion and one with vehemence.

Adam is not the Almighty, even when leant Her voice. He is a fourteen year old boy who has been pushed to the limit by adults who demand he behaves better than them. And he is sick of it. But he is also the Antichrist.

“ **BECAUSE OF THEM,** ” the blond haired, red-eyed Beast bellows in the voice of God, pointing a grubby finger at Aziraphale and the dead demon in his arms. “ **Because they… ( _Please_ can I get Pepper to do this? Her mum told her all these fancy words and, and…) ergh...**” There is a breath of wind that rolls across the universe, both warm, chilling, and utterly infuriated.

The Almighty tilts Her head, still waiting. **Tell them,** She prompts.

Aziraphale looks up into the firmament, uncertain whether it's God or Adam who speaks, barely ably to trust his own senses because since Crowley died he feels as if half of him has been riven into ash.

“ **THEY WERE MEANT TO BE ENEMIES. They were _made_ to be enemies. But they - they stopped… They stopped and became friends instead. An’ and Anathema said they should get married - she said - and - and now they won’t. They won’t ever BECAUSE OF YOU!**”

The Almighty rests two fingers upon Adam’s shoulder in a space that is no space and a time that is no time. **I will give you the choice, Adam Young. You have the power to raze them _all_ from existence for their transgression and know that Heaven and Hell may never war again. Or you may resurrect the Serpent of Eden, Crowley, and leave the rest to time, hoping your words are enough. Which will it be?**

Adam’s eyes blaze ember-bright and his fingers curl up into his palms making fists.

The Almighty’s expression falls, inch by inch, a slow collapse into disappointment.

Adam stuffs his fists into his pockets, his shoulders hunched over in the dangerously recalcitrant pose of teenagers in a snit that's rightly loathed and feared by adults everywhere.

“ **NO,** ” he says and it's a word that reverberates across the cosmos. “ **No. You can all go home - back where you're meant t'be - an' think about what you did! All of you. Except for you two,** ” he points again at Aziraphale and Crowley. “ **You… you can go** _ **home,** ” _he says quietly.

* * *

He's warm, which is nice because he has a recent memory of pain and deep coldness he doesn't want to remember at all. He shivers, his senses dragging their feet as they return. He's lying down, or not quite, he seems to be in someone's arms, which is patently ridiculous! He tries to chivvy his senses along, get his thoughts to hold hands and pay attention. Wait - dear Heaven - was someone _rocking_ him? And as he inhales why can he scent drying blood and fresh tears?

 _No, no, no, nope, definitely nope._ Whatever's going on, Crowley doesn't like it. And yet at the same time he _is_ comfortable and the world is far nicer than he was expecting given whatever in Heaven's name just happened to him. He deliberates. To keep his eyes closed is to remain in ignorance of the situation, which in turn means Crowley doesn't have to deal with it, and for some reason right now he doesn't feel up to dealing with anything much. But if he doesn't open his eyes, he won't know... _Ah fuck._ Curiosity always has been his downfall.

Crowley bullies his eyes to stutter open and then to resolve the pale-toned shapes they see into something that makes sense. His head is nestled in the crook of an arm, up against a shoulder that's clad in swathes of fine wool over embroidered linen. The stitching is gold and it's... Enochian?

The demon makes a small startled noise best described as 'ngk!'.

Whoever's holding him stills their rocking - for a moment they seem entirely too still - Crowley isn't even certain their heart is beating. "Crowley?" asks a voice that has never sounded quite so small, uncertain and hopeful in all of its millennia of existence.

He lets out a small huff, uncertain why Aziraphale is being so dramatic but fully prepared to rib him about it at the first opportunity. “Hey angel. Nice wings. Why are you wearing Celestial robes?” A note of vagueness creeps into his voice as he realises how tired he is even if he has no idea why.

Aziraphale smiles at him, blinking his eyes a little too rapidly and giving a startled laugh. He cups his left palm briefly against the demon's cheek. "Oh, I dare say it doesn't matter. It's been a very trying day."

Crowley still has zero idea why he's in Aziraphale's arms with the angel in full Heavenly regalia and the both of them on the bookshop floor. What he does know is that it's bound to be his fault and the angel is sure to get snippy about it any second so he really should find the energy to move. “Right. I’ll - I'll just…” he tries to move, to roll, to _something_ but the arms holding him curl tighter, and from the hitching of the chest he's pressed up against it sounds like his angel is trying not to cry. _Oh, nonononono, this is the fucking limit..._ “Az-Aziraphale, what’s wrong? Is - is that _blood_ on your robe?”

Then the arms around him loosen, allowing enough space between them so they can see one another's faces. Aziraphale smiles and shakes his head although his eyes are over-bright and his cheeks are wet. “Nothing’s wrong my dear… Nothing at all. So long as I still have you.”

"When didn't you have..." His voice stalls as he registers the robes of ashen black he's wearing and the fact his hair is in its natural state: a loose tumble of fiery curls. The rest of the day comes back to him with all the subtlety of a diamond brick to the skull. "Oh," he says weakly.

"'Oh' indeed. We have Adam Young to thank for our return and the cessation of hostilities."

Crowley frowns. "Did you heal me?"

Aziraphale's expression shuffles uncomfortably between sorrow, embarrassment and remorse. "No. I - I'm afraid I wasn't able to."

"So I was..."

"Yes," the angel admits quickly, wanting the conversation over with.

"Huh. No wonder I feel like the thrice blesssed."

"I could put you on the sofa with a blanket and rustle up some cocoa if you'd like? Or I'm sure I could find something stronger - or..."

Crowley shakes his head, eyes already aching to close. "Can I jus... jusst... sstay here a bit? It'sss nice..."

The angel kisses his forehead, settles them both more comfortably, and doesn't say anything about the demon's use of that taboo'd four-letter-word. "Of course you may, my dear. For as long as you wish. But," he adds, "if you don't wake up in a timely fashion tomorrow morning, I shall deposit you on the sofa. Possibly from a great height."

The demon mumbles something that may or may not be, 'bastard' as he curls closer against Aziraphale with a slight but satisfied smile and surrenders to sleep.


End file.
